Taxation and Public Goods: A Welfare-economic Critique of Tax Policy Analysis

Are live policymakers slaves to the ideas of dead economists, as John Keynes is supposed to have claimed? Is there a connection between the taxes people pay and the ideas of economic thinkers?

In Taxation and Public Goods, Herbert Kiesling investigates the key relationship between taxation and problems involved with welfare aggregation. He demonstrates how problems in thinking about aggregation have limited tax analysis in important ways, causing it to be overly narrow and even ethically biased. Professor Kiesling then posits and defends a new model of taxation that incorporates rewards, efficiency, needs, freedoms, and equality and is designed to provide a more complete and balanced evaluation of tax policies than has been available heretofore.

Taxation and Public Goods will be essential reading for economists interested in conducting broader, more complete investigations of social policy concerns.